Compelling

The Age of the Nano-Demographic: P2P Marketing

October 7, 2010
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In college, I learned about new music from my friends.  Like it or not, I picked up tips about personal style from them, too.  You can blame them for some of the looks I’ve sported through time.  The important point here is that my market-facing tendencies are not defined by my age, race, or socio-economic [...]

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Google Instant Search: Backing into semantics

September 30, 2010
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What It Is
Google recently released its Google Instant search product. It is basically a recommendation engine on steroids. The way it works is that, as you type, search terms are recommended; starting with the first letter.  For instance, typing “W” will present you with the weather forecast based on your geographic location.  That’s [...]

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I Had a Dream (Update)

September 16, 2010
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Back in June of 2008, I wrote a post detailing a vision I had for Apple tech working with television for enhanced viewing.  Well, ABC Television just released the My Generation Sync app for iPad which behaves pretty much how I imagined it.  The video does a better job of explaining it than I can:

Of [...]

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Toward a More Usable City

August 6, 2010
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A B-Cycle kiosk was just installed in front of the John Hancock Center in Chicago.  It’s good to see bike sharing make its way to this side of the Atlantic.  I’ve already seen bikes being rented from the kiosk.  I think the fact that the bike can be grabbed from a kiosk is critical to [...]

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When You Assume…

August 5, 2010
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Recently, there was a post over at DiscoBlog on the Discover Magazine site that mentioned a study that claims that women who wax have better sex.  It reminded me how quickly we can be led astray by settling on the first assumption.  At first blush, one would assume that if you are a woman and [...]

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Our Objects Are Listening

June 29, 2010
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In the last post, I mentioned that our objects are listening to us.  Much of this is done in the name of providing a better experience – if an object can adjust to the way in which you interact with it, it should be able to anticipate some of your future requirements or actions.  In [...]

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Apple HTML5 Showcase

June 4, 2010
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Apple has added a showcase of HTML5 functionality on their site. It’s a pretty impressive display. However, you’re limited to Safari for viewing options. As HTML5 continues to get rolled out as a standard, creating rich web experiences will get a whole lot easier. I just hope that the uncomfortable period [...]

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Back to the Apps

June 3, 2010
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A friend of mine is co-owner of an iPad. That’s right, he shares it with a friend. While he doesn’t have primary custody, he got naming rights and calls it “Paddington.” Even though I called him a 12 year old girl, he offered to lend the iPad to me for a few [...]

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Design Traceability

April 23, 2010
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Kids are notorious for asking “Why?”  Each answer you provide leads to another “why.”  Each exchange leads closer to some central truth.  With kids, that central truth usually ends up being, “Because I said so!”  To designers, business stakeholders are also notorious.  Not so much for asking why as they are for saying, “I think [...]

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Zeitgeist from the Cloud – Tapping your audience

March 17, 2010

Jeffrey Veen has an interesting post over at his blog discussing a stream of Twitter data coming in while he was speaking at a conference. He says he felt as though he was cheating on an exam by “listening” to what the audience was saying as he was speaking. By addressing audience concerns [...]

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